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Teenage Mogul Launches 'Summly' To Revolutionize Mobile Reading

Remember Nick D’Aloisio? The teenage wunderkind featured in the pages of Forbes earlier this year when he got a financial backer that would get most startup founders salivating: Li Ka-shing, one of the world’s richest men. Li was backing the technology D’Aloisio had developed night after night, after class, in his bedroom from the summer of 2011: an algorithm to summarize news articles by picking out their most salient sentences, and presenting them to time-starved mobile phone users.

Now the energetic teen is back, with more big-name supporters like Ashton Kucher, Stephen Fry and (believe it or not) Yoko Ono, and a repackaged app. Summly is out today on iOS for the iPhone, with D’Aloisio having spent the last nine months hiring a designer, re-drafting a new interface, improving his summarization algorithm, getting his big-name supporters and discussing partnerships with New York-based publishers. In the mean time his private school in London has given him a few months sabbatical. Today he turns 17.

Despite his age (and probably also because of it) D’Aloisio has managed to create a cloud of hype around his product. He has barrels of enthusiasm. I spoke to him last week via a Skype video call while he was in LA to meet with angel investors, and he spoke at a rapid clip and with much gesticulating about what he wanted to achieve with Summly.

“We’re trying to be the first news service ever that is 100%-optimized for the mobile screen size,” he said, holding an iPhone featuring the app up to the web cam and swiping through tiles. The app works by showing you a set of colored tiles for each news topic, which you can swipe to update, then tap to open a series of summarized stories. Each summary has a headline at the top, and text that just fits on to the mobile screen. D’Aloisio’s algorithm has not edited and re-written the story (no algorithm can do that, yet) but used a series of metrics to chose its most important sentences. Swiping takes you to the original website.

“For years you had full-length content that worked well on Macs and desktops, but when it comes to an iPhone screen, I fundamentally believe we should be changing the content. I don’t have to wait to download a 1,500 word article that I’m not going to be able to read on this screen,” he said, holding up his phone again. “When I’m walking to a station or bus stop, I want a snack-sized bit of information.”

D’Aloisio also showed off the app’s new user-interface, which has echoes of the Windows Phone tiles. “Everything about it is simplistic, minimal and summarized. It’s clean.” He tapped on one of the summaries and grinned as a stylized, four-petaled “flower” of sharing buttons swirled onto the screen, to allow social-media sharing. “It’s frictionless,” he said, adding that the app could eventually work with Android, Windows and for other iOS screen sizes too.

I’m curious how he managed to get such big names from the tech world on board, since he rattled off AirBNB founder Brian Chesky, Zinga founder Mark Pimcus and Lady Gaga manager Troy Carter as supporters. D’Aloisio is notorious for his persistence, having once badgered me and other journalists with hundreds of emails to get some of his early apps some publicity, and the scale of his ambitions was notable early on when he referred to his one-man app business in the “we.” D’Aloisio said the new connections came about through his advisors with Horizons Ventures, Li Ka-shing’s investment vehicle. “A lot of those people know each other, and they’re friends,” he said.

So, what of his app? The interface and usability of Summly is miles ahead of the first summarisation app D’Aloisio put out earlier this year, called Trimmit. It has more options for personalization and of course the social sharing options. The photos at the top of each summary add colour, but they suggest an obligation to aesthetics more than the fulfilment of any sort of function.

Nick D'Aloisio (photo via Summly)

The automated summaries are also decent, even if they are just sentences picked out from original text, and I can see people going to the Summly app as a portal to bite-sized news previews.

My initial sense however is that the app has yet to become truly “sticky,” and that may have something to do with the summarized sentences being picked by an algorithm and not a human. Reading the summaries is clearly efficient, but the text doesn’t take root in the mind quite as firmly as an summarized article in say, The Week magazine, which relies on human editing, re-writing and structuring.

D’Aloisio will no doubt keep pushing for improvements, though, and he claims there is lots of interest in his technology from media companies. He’s also planning to expand the app outside the English-speaking world, since the algorithm relies on metrics more than semantics, making it language independent.

The app could use some polish, sure, but anything that elegantly condenses the glut of text that hits the web has potential to pick up traction over time.

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Our mogul would be wise to extend summly to android and even BlackBerry devices, or face extinction – not everybody has an iphone – and unless an enormous number of iphone people play along – it’s a certain crash into the trees for this high-flying kid!

Not Impressed. Twitter is much more useful. Nice try for a High School brat. I have known many game programmers at his age who are much more talented. Perhaps he should go into Public Relations instead. Also, every news service has been optimizing for iphones for 5 years now. So claiming to be the 1st service is false.

Not Impressed. Twitter is much more useful. Nice try for a High School brat. I have known many game programmers at his age who are much more talented. Perhaps he should go into Public Relations instead. Also, every news service has been optimizing for iphones for 5 years now. So claiming to be the 1st service is false.

Lesson: entrepreneurs should front their startup with a teen. expect to see it happen.